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A Comjion Apple Pudding

A steamed apple pudding made with flour, suet, apples, lemon, optional spices, butter, marmalade, and sea salt.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and orange match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 10,634 recipes. Both carry 3-hexenal, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

A Comjion Apple Pudding

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the crust

  1. Make a light crust by mixing flour and suet until crumbly. Use butter in the crust.

Fill and tie

  1. Roll the crust thin and fill it with the apples.

  2. Add lemon juice and rind, and add marmalade to the apples.

  3. Tie the pudding in a cloth.

Boil

  1. Boil for 1 hour and 20 minutes before Christmas.

  2. Boil for 20-30 minutes longer after Christmas.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Lemon + orangetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,634 recipes

    Shared aroma: 3-hexenal (apple, fruity).

  2. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  3. Apple + orangetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,230 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  4. Nutmeg + orangetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together2,746 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  5. Flour + nutmegtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together18,623 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the crust as it sets with heat.
Beef suet
Adds richness and a tender, crumbly texture to the crust.
Apples
Provide moisture and the main fruit flavour inside the pudding.
Butter
Adds richness and tenderness to the crust when used.
Marmalade
Adds sweetness and a bitter-citrus note to the apples.

The step that matters

Boiling the tied pudding for the full time. Steady boiling water heats the pudding evenly, melting the suet and setting the flour so the crust cooks through. Cutting the time short leaves the centre doughy and the apples underdone.

Swap the nutmeg

The recipe marks nutmeg as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, beef, apple, lemon, butter, orange):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Thymefits about as well
  3. Nutmegthe original
  4. Tarragonfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, beef, apple, lemon, butter, orange. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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